Speeches before the Los Angeles World Affairs Council on February 5

Speeches before the Los Angeles World Affairs Council on February 5, 2002:

Vitaly Ignatenko
Director General, ITAR-TASS Russian News Agency

Tara Abramyan
President, Union of Armenians in Russia

Vitaly Ignatenko

Good afternoon. It’s a great honor for us to be here in your wonderful city. We are grateful for the invitation to the World Affairs Council, to the president of the World Affairs Council, and to all the distinguished members.

I think it was a heroic deed on your part to come in such beautiful weather, to actually spare your time to come and meet me and Mr. Abramyan. Generally speaking, I think Los Angeles is such a beautiful city that people of the world should probably take turns living in this city.

Certainly I have a serious subject to discuss here today. So, to begin our discussion on the right note, I’d like to touch briefly upon the history of the question. Even a few years ago when people asked, “How are things in Russia?” it was possible to answer that question in one word, or maybe two. The obvious answers were, if you say it in one word it’s “good” or “well,” and if it’s in two words then it’s “not so well.” At this point I think our situation is more transparent, more understandable, ever since President Putin came to power and it’s become easy, it’s become possible to foresee the future in Russia today to a certain extent, and that’s our great hope at this point. Obviously, I will not be speaking to you about our successes; maybe it’s not the right place to do so here, but we do have problems, also. Of course, about successes I will speak to my Russian friends with great zeal. Speaking here, though, I would like to draw attention to two contentious issues that both the government and the public in our country are facing at this point.

The first is the transition to a true civil society, including human rights and freedom of speech and freedom of the press. I can confidently say that in the past ten years we’ve covered the path that for many other countries took maybe decades or hundreds of years. I still remember a time when it took two phones to run TASS, basically. The first phone would be to get directions from the Kremlin, the other phone I would use to give directions myself to my subordinates. Luckily the time has passed us now. I can now, with full confidence, say to you here that there is freedom of the press in Russia. But, of course, the practical implementation of that freedom runs into certain problems. For instance, at this point we have about 2,000 independent TV and radio stations in our country, private TV and radio stations. Overall, in the world there are 3,000 such stations and 2,000 of them are in our country. And the state owns just 170 of those stations. But still, despite the existence of this great mass of independent television and radio stations, their owners are not clear.

The situation with the market and mass media is the most complex, maybe, among all the segments of the market in Russia at this point. Having done with the state-controlled over the mass media, the mass media mostly fell into the trap of falling under the control of big business and, unfortunately, they become a tool to influence the public life in the country. So, to repeat again, big business uses the mass media -- and it’s often the criminal segment of the business. They use the mass media to try to influence national politics.

So, our main task here is to bring the mass media under truly public control in our country. Take, for instance, the conflict around the TV-6 television stations in Moscow. TV-6 is a privately-held company that is owned by several oligarchic groups. Of course, the oligarchs are the brand names for the new Russian capitalists. So when you have conflict between the business groups it is projected to the public as a conflict between the journalists and the powers-that-be in the government. If you try to resolve this issue through purely legal mechanisms, through the courts, then we immediately fall into the trap of anti-democratic solutions or decisions. That is, you try to approach this issue as if it was purely an economic issue between businesses. So the legal issue to close TV-6 was immediately politicized. As a result, despite the fact that both President Putin and Prime Minister Kasyanov proclaimed themselves being on the side of the journalists, on the side of the team of TV-6, the company was for all practical effects ruined. Of course, in a month they will be taking part in the tender to get back their license for broadcasting, these same journalists.

But I think all sides are on the losing side in this dispute; there are no winners in this situation. First and foremost, the public is on the losing side, because the public is afraid that the anti-democratic times are coming back in Russia. Very great damage has been caused to the authorities, to the government, that has not been able to handle this situation correctly, great material losses for investors, and obviously a team of journalists who are not able to function as they should at this point. Obviously, I can see the difficulty for President Putin here where he cannot stand on any one side in this dispute. He’s been basically painted into a corner like some naughty schoolboy who’s been punished and the only thing left for him is to stand in that corner and to try and excuse himself somehow, to find excuses for what he did. Of course, … a great satirist once wrote, whatever happens in Russia, it happens the other way around. When you say that something happens, it’s exactly the opposite of what actually took place. All the other journalists that were planning to compete for the license of TV-6 will probably now drop out of the race and the TV-6 team will probably be the only one left there, claiming the license back for itself.

The second big issue that directly reflects upon the future of the political image of Russia is the issue of Chechnya. Certainly the Russian public understands that the war has been going too long; that it causes damage to the government, to the authorities and to the public in general. And although for the past few months there are no real mass-scale military operations in Chechnya people sill die there. We are calling for a practical dialogue with those opposed to the forces of the Russian Federation there. But unfortunately there is no one there. Basically, there is no one to talk to, there’s no one to take part in the dialogue from their side. Unfortunately, there are still very many foreign mercenaries in Chechnya. The biggest band of such mercenaries is headed by a well-known Arab terrorist who has been staying in the Caucasus for a number of years now. Iban Khatab [sic] is his name. Iban Khatab and his associates have use of great financial resources, have access to great financial resources that come to them through foreign channels, through foreign countries. In Russia, for a very long time we’ve had information that these people have been tied together with the terrorists from Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups around the world. The people who are captured there, the fighters who are captured by the Russian forces, invariably tell about training in camps in Kandahar in Afghanistan – terrorist camps. Obviously, all of this is not meant to represent in a simplistic light the situation in Chechnya itself. The people there cannot start trying to make a peaceful life for themselves. And the authorities that might be formed by the Chechans themselves are immediately annihilated by the bandits, by the terrorists, and that is the biggest challenge, that is the biggest problem for the Chechans.

This is exactly why the refugees cannot come back to their homes in Chechnya from neighboring republics, although even now some conditions have been reestablished, for instance, hundreds of schools are in operation and even a university or two. But obviously you cannot call it the normal surroundings for a normal life. So I must tell you this is probably the biggest challenge, the biggest headache for our president. This is what he devotes the most time to, and he is sincerely striving for the peaceful blue skies over Chechnya to stay, to come, to be there, and to stay for that nation.

On this optimistic note, I would like to give the floor to my good friend, Mr. Abramyan, and then maybe answer your questions.

Thank you.

Ara Abramyan

Good afternoon, Mrs. President, members of the Council. Thank you for your kind invitation to speak in this beautiful city and in front of such a distinguished audience. I’m glad to meet business leaders, public leaders, public opinion leaders. It’s a great honor for me, and I attribute it mostly to my native land of Russia and the Russian people but also maybe, in part, to my historic motherland of Armenia and the Armenian people -- which, by the way, as we all know, forms a great part of the population of your beautiful city and of your state of California.

Having entered the new 21^st century all of us, public officials and entrepreneurs, are in need of finding ways to resolve the mountains of complex problems facing our civilization. It’s an exceedingly difficult task so it requires joint efforts of all nations and new non-traditional approaches. The rapid collapse of the socialist system has brought about the disintegration of the former Soviet Union. And the Soviet Union was not the only one, of course. Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia are other examples. As a result of that disintegration we obviously face now dozens of new hot-beds of ethnic tensions, of religious tensions. Such strife at times develops into full-blown wars. These wars obviously cause great losses of life, great material losses, and one of the tragedies here is that as a result of this, scores of millions of people have overnight become sort of aliens in the lands where their ancestors had been living for hundreds of years. They had to find ways of adapting to their new cultural, political and economic surroundings. In a number of cases they became the “new foreigners” in the newly-born countries. Absorption by all new immigrants is helped enormously by their compatriots already living there. The better organized ethnic and religious groups are in a given country, the more political, economic, cultural and information opportunities they have to ease the process of integration of the newly-arrived compatriots.

I fully realize that the problem of ending ethnic conflicts and helping great masses of people to adapt to new surroundings is faced mostly by those ethnic groups that have found themselves in the position of non-titular minorities in the new independent states. This is especially true for post-Soviet states. The experience of the U.S. and other highly developed countries is a lesson of utmost importance for us, the leaders of ethnic communities in these countries, especially in Russia. Here in America you create civilized, acceptable norms of integrating every ethnic community into a politically and culturally unified nation. We certainly need to use the American experience where you don’t have either titular or non-titular nations or identities, where every person who comes to the U.S. and becomes a U.S. citizen feels himself or herself equal to anybody else regardless of where they come from, the color of their skin or their nationality, or their religion.

At the same time we need to realize that, although we do know which direction to take, we start the process from an extremely difficult starting point. After the crash of the Soviet totalitarian regime, all countries emerging from the ruins of the former Soviet Union, and especially Russia, face problems with establishing for themselves a national religious geo-political, cultural and linguistic identity.

Like all other post-Soviet states, Russia entered on the road to democracy and free markets without all those components that, in the West, helped national minorities to adapt. In Russia today the Russians themselves are in the midst of carving out a national identity for themselves. To illustrate, let me give you an example from the recent history of Armenians trying to adapt in Russia. Unfortunately, it’s accompanied by a conflict between the Armenians and the Cossacks in the Krasnodar region in the south of Russia. It has the largest Armenian Diaspora in Russia. By different estimates it’s from 600,000 to 800,000 people, which is almost equal to the number of Armenians living in this beautiful God-blessed state of California. In many places these Armenians form tightly-knit and rather wealthy communities. That breeds envy and resentment because, from the daily life perspective, the success of your neighbor is very often taken by people as a loss to themselves.

I can give you another example. Recently, there were riots in Moscow where about 300 youngsters, young hoodlums basically, attacked people of Azer origin, Azerbaijanis in Moscow. And although the victims of those attacks were the Azeris, the Azeri merchants in Moscow, the Union of Armenians in Russia was among the first to come out against this violence and to demand protection for these people. We also need to understand here that these things that I’m describing in terms of the Krasnodar [region], that is an exception for Russia in general, in terms of the local authorities to be openly nationalistic, and on the federal level and on the part of the union of the Armenians of Russia these practices are roundly denounced and opposed.

It is also impossible for me not to mention that many multi-ethnic and multi-confessional countries can draw useful lessons from how the United States government and the American public reacted to the tragic events of 9/11 that shook not only America but the whole world. There were quite a few predictions, as you remember, of a war between civilizations, of threats of ethnic and religious intolerance emerging in the United States and the world as a whole. People warned about a possible upsurge of intolerance towards Muslims, about the threat of mass pogroms. To the honor of American democracy, state and national institutions and their civil society and the public as a whole gave decisive opposition to this anti-Arab and anti-Muslim feeling when they did arise. It served as evidence of the fact that a democratic culture of pluralism and tolerance has deep roots in the American society as well as the full integration of all ethnic sub-cultures into the American body politic.

[Regarding] the question of Armenians in Russia. The Armenians fell victims to the first mass genocide of 1878-1923, but the Armenians were not broken as a nation by this tragic history. Even under the current conditions of globalization they prove once again that they can go on serving humanity with the same usefulness as throughout their breathtaking history. All of us, I mean the ethnic communities in Russia, and the Armenians in particular, are equally interested in strengthening Russia’s economy and the growing well-being of all citizens of the country. Among the aims and objectives of the Union of Armenians in Russia I would like to highlight those that may be of special interest to the World Affairs Council. First and foremost, it has to do with the role that Russian Armenians can play in making the process of normalization and rapprochement between Russia and the United States irreversible. We believe that Armenians with their large and influential communities, both in Russia and in the United States, can and should help move this process along. They have the wherewithal to do this.

Since I’m not only a Russian citizen, but an ethnic Armenian, and since I am speaking in a country that enjoys the third largest Armenian community in the world after Armenia and Russia, I’d like to try and anticipate some possible questions involving Armenians all over the world. One of them is the issue of drawing a civilized line under the past of the Armenian-Turkish relationship. We proceed from the assumption that there is no more room for Turkey acknowledging responsibility for this crime than there is for Germany to acknowledge the Holocaust. Today, the issue is on reaffirming international responsibility of Turkey for this crime and on resolving underlying questions on the basis of international law and justice.

Another vital issue of concern for Armenians all over the world is the fate of the Armenian people of Nagorno-Karabakh. By the way, a couple of days ago I was in New York at the International Economic Forum, a great and very interesting and important forum for all the participants. There were about 3,000 people from all over the world, business leaders, political leaders, and in particular the President of Azerbaijan was taking part, Mr. Heydar Aliyev and we had a brief discussion with the President, with President Aliyev, on the issues that I believe concern and worry both my people and the Azerbaijani people. Mostly, of course, I mean the Karabakh settlement. We are proceeding from the legal fact that this territory has always been populated by Armenians and never did it belong to the Azeris. It has always been a part of the Armenian state, and after its collapse, the collapse of the Armenian state, it moved on to the jurisdiction of Iran and then was ceded by Iran to Russia through a treaty in 1813. A search for a mutually-acceptable solution can only be peaceful, through negotiations based on recognizing the sovereign statehood of the Nagorno- Karabakh Armenian Republic.

In conclusion, I would like to thank again Mrs. President, the members of the Council and all the guests for their attention. We are now open for questions.